Editing text / Cars only / On temperature / On hiring, firing, loyalty, and management…

Patience: A minor form of despair, disguised as virtue. The Devil's dictionary

Editing text

On a normal day, I use Apple's TextEdit to edit my blog (pure html), vi on Solaris to edit my blog, vi to edit some scripts (perl, sh, awk, sed) on my Apple, TexShop to write my thesis (LaTex), Safari browser to write comments to discussion forum (ascii text, usually). Sometimes I have to use Word to write some homework assignments. It is strange how one can get used to so many different editing environments and be fluent in all of them - not to mention Emacs, which I also used every now and then.

Cars only

The signs over the entrances of Sturrow and Memorial drives say: "Cars only". I do not know what they mean. I have not seen any large trucks (but many pick-up trucks) nor busses there. I have seen many motorcycles there. And I have been cycling there. Have I broken the law? Should I turn myself in? Get a ticket?

On temperature

While cycling today I came to wonder how non-linear (stepwise) my response to temperature is. Consider cycling. When temperature is over +14C, wearing only shorts and T-shirt is enough. Between +10C and 14C I need to wear long socks and long-sleeved shirt. When temperature falls below +10C, I need to put a windproof jacket on (with no lining). I do not yet know, at which temperature I need to switch to long trousers, or start using gloves. I assume the jacket, shorts, socks, and a long sleeved shirt will be enough until the temperature drops below +2C or so. In total, very stepwise and non-linear response to temperature.
The weather was incredibly nice today: sunny, rather calm, +7C. It was really a pleasure to cycle for an hour around Charlestown, Cambridge and Boston.

On hiring, firing, loyalty, and management

Anonymous has a good point in his comment:

Ten years ago companies were more interested to have the "employees commit themselves to the company", and if you have indeed committed employees the companies wouldn't mind letting them be a little less productive while just learning something new, and the employees wouldn't mind a little dirty work if they had hopes for a better next task.
Then the bubble burst, companies fired scores of previously their "committed" employees purely based on budgets aimed to maximize the dividend, and unsurprisingly the employees would never be fooled to "committing themselves" again. So, instead of committed employees you nowadays can only hope to find professional employees. They may be industrious and competent, but they are also fast to leave immediately when they here of a better job or a higher salary. Therefore the companies don't believe or hope to find committed people and give them time to learn, but instead they hope to find the "hit the ground running"-professionals that hopefully finish their task before disappearing again.

I was there, when this change happened. I remember, that I was saying this at the time and even before the firing-parties. I still think that all employees would do better if they would consider themselves mercenaries: working for the party, who pays the most and is in some kind of agreement with mercenary's ethical and political beliefs (sic!). Having said this, I must say that I do believe the new situation to be much worse than the previous. It is much harder to develop certain types of systems, if one cannot be reasonably sure that some (high) portion of key personnel will be there for years. It just takes time to develop certain systems and much of the knowledge and skills needed are tacit. But what can one do? If companies only look at their quarterly results, employees are totally disillusioned, we need to adapt and change our management ways. I just do not exactly know how.
The lack of commitment (loyalty) on both sides of employment will lead to lower importance of corporations. More and more professionals will become independent contractors, in the same way film-actors, directors, and other workers in the in film industry, have been for a long time now. To make this happen, and to provide for a good life, governments must provide health care and a basic social safety net. It would make the market more efficient and predictable. And it is the right thing to do anyhow. (See also The future of work by Thomas W. Malone. He has some deeper discussion on this issue, written in more than 10 minutes)

Talking to a robot

Try talking to a robot. Add "MovieFone" to your AIM-buddy list. It tells you about movies. Rest of the robots are available atAOL-site.
Here is my discussion with the AOLSafetyBot:

Me: Osama!
AOLSafetyBot: Excuse me?
Me: Yes, osama!
AOLSafetyBot: Good.
Me: Really!
AOLSafetyBot: Mm Hm, now we are getting somwhere.
Me: Osama comes and bombs you!
AOLSafetyBot: We keep running into the same problem. I'm trying to learn but you've lost me there.
Me: Really?
AOLSafetyBot: Without a doubt.
Me: Bush!
AOLSafetyBot: Hey, I'm new at this. Is that something safety related? That's really my main aread of
expertise.

Peter Elk on "European model"

Peter Elk does not blog too often, but when he writes, he has something very well-thought to say. If you can read Finnish, do yourself a favour and read his newest entry. He should publish it in some Finnish magazine.

Systems - when are they equal

Let's say we have two systems S and T. When do we say they are equal? I assume we have to use extensional definition of equality. The systems are equal if they produce the same output with the same input. Intensional definition of equality does not work. If we would use it, the systems would have to have the same implementation in order to be equal. In my thesis, I intend to compare several models of equal systems in terms of their complexity. Clearly it does not make sense, if we require the systems to be intensionally equal - we would be comparing two modelling schemas, which is not out purpose. Even with extensional equality we will have some hand-waving to do: for just looking at input and output is a bit constrained. At least we have to count external interfaces (those crossing the system boundary) as inputs or outputs. Hmm. I need to think of this a bit more. Some progress, though, still today. Feels good!
Hmm, even given equal systems we still need to fix the level of abstraction (detailedness) of the models. If the models do not have equal levels of abstraction, comparing them in terms of complexity does not make much sense. At the moment, I have no real idea how to define equality of abstraction levels. It must have something to do with the main functions/processes in the model. They have to be the same (or of similar abstraction level). This is getting hard.
Click the picture on the right and you can see which wine I was drinking!

Alun perin julkaistu kuukausikoosteessa "Blogs November 2005".